Did you know that these are “the toughest times any president has ever faced”? Rahm Emanuel knows. And he’s saying goodbye to all that. I don’t know what’s more frightening: that this is what the president’s Chief of Staff for … Continue reading →
Note the following, from a 2007 (that is: pre-Obama, pre-financial meltdown) review of The Forgotten Man, the Amity Shlaes book on the Great Depression: As Shlaes emphasizes, the New Dealers tended to see business as an institution to be squeezed … Continue reading →
Commenter David Foster has written a two-part book review of historian and author Sebastian Haffner’s Defying Hitler (part I is here, part II here). I would say “read the whole thing.” But I’ll amend that a bit and say instead, … Continue reading →
[NOTE: The following is a reposting of a piece that appeared here on a previous Hiroshima anniversary. If you follow the links in the second paragraph, you’ll find three other pieces I’ve written about the decision to drop the bomb … Continue reading →
Perhaps you’ve already seen the video of Helen Thomas giving the Jews of Israel some decidedly unfriendly advice about just where they should go: And you’ve probably seen the calls for Hearst to fire Helen Thomas and encourage her none-too-early … Continue reading →
Note the following comment from someone called “SWJ,” written May 21 at 04:37 PM and appearing on this comment thread: We have to have a Carter-like fool get elected now and then to remind America why the left can’t be … Continue reading →
Timothy Garton Ash says that Europe needs a new Churchill to add “dynamism” to the moribund EU: The European Union is still the world’s largest economy. It has enormous resources of hard and soft power, at present much bigger than … Continue reading →
Remember Henry Gates, Obama’s buddy who had a run-in a while back with a Cambridge cop? A few weeks ago he published a surprisingly balanced and thoughtful opinion piece in the NY Times that admitted the role of Africans in … Continue reading →
It is impossible not to suspect that foul play was involved in the plane crash death of Polish President Lech Kaczynski in Russia: Polish President Lech Kaczynski and some of the country’s highest military and civilian leaders died on Saturday … Continue reading →
By now we all have probably noticed the strange phenomenon of people who are highly accomplished in their own fields but who fail to exercise even a modicum of common sense when opining outside them. I’ve been reading Thomas Sowell’s … Continue reading →
We keep hearing that the passage of HCR was historical—or, in the immortal words of the great Joe Biden, “A big F-ing deal.” But “historical”—or even “big F-ing deal”—has no moral valence. It doesn’t mean “good” or “bad.” It just … Continue reading →
Commenter Artfldgr, our resident historian, has reminded us that yesterday was the anniversary of the Enabling Act in Germany, 1933. The Act (the full name of which can be translated as the “Law to Remedy the Distress of the People … Continue reading →